Virtual Mode

CHAPTER 5—SEQIRO

COLENE remained in a daze. He had been right! Darius really was from a far Kingdom of Laughter where magic worked. She had not believed, and so had thrown away her chance for happiness.

Yet he had changed his mind too. He had thought she was full of joy, and had recoiled when she told him the truth. He had wanted only one thing from her, and that had been not her body but her happiness. She had been happy with him; without him she was the same old suicidal shell.

Now she was paging through her Journal, which she kept under lock and key here in Dogwood Bumshed, trying to distract her mind from her present distress by contemplating her past distress. She called it a Journal and not a diary, because “diary” sound like “diarrhea” and she was not about to put her sanitary thoughts in an unsanitary place like that. She made her entries in the form of letters to her friend Maresy, who was actually an imaginary horse. Colene had never had a horse, but always wanted one, not just to ride, but to be her understanding companion. People were not necessarily fit to understand, but Maresy had more than human fathoming. Maresy was a most unusual animal.

TO: Maresy Doats North Forty Pasture Summerland, OK 73500

Dear Maresy,

My friend Eney Locke did the craziest thing last night! She was at this party, and she wandered out on a balcony and gazed down into the concrete alley one floor down, thinking her usual dark thoughts. A boy came out, someone she knew mostly casually, a decent type. He said, “Oh, are you looking for the way out?” and she said, “Yes, but it’s not far enough.” Then she realized that she had spoken aloud, and he realized that she was neither lost nor joking. He was appalled. “Eney—you mean you’re—?” he asked. And she, faced with this excellent chance to confess her secret and perhaps have some sympathy, blew it. “I was joking!” she snapped, and pushed on past him, back into the party where everyone was drunk and happy.

The key to this was that Colene spelled backwards was Eneloc, broken in two with letters added for camouflage: Eney Locke. She was talking about herself, but not directly, in case someone should get at her Journal before she had a chance to destroy it. She had the need to talk to someone, a desperate need, but obviously her parents were out, and she couldn’t afford to trust anyone she knew at school. Once she had made the mistake of trusting a friend at camp. Never again! But Maresy was the epitome of equine discretion, partly because she could not speak in any human language. That did not mean that Maresy could not communicate, just that it required special comprehension to know what was on her mind. A horse could say a lot just in the orientation of her ears.

Actually the address was fake. Maresy lived only in her mind. So she had made up a place for the horse to live, and used her own zip code rounded off to the nearest even hundred. As far as she knew, there was no such number, which was fine. She was never actually going to mail any of those letters. For one thing, Maresy didn’t live where she seemed; that OK in her address stood for Okay. She was always Okay.

There were boxes in the margins of the Journal. They weren’t exactly code; it was just that she drew them when she was disturbed, and the more disturbed she was, the more numerous and elaborate those little boxes became. She didn’t need to read the actual entries to know how she had felt when making them; the boxes told. Sometimes there were only one or two plain cubes; sometimes there was an elaborate network of boxes that completely surrounded the text. Sometimes they resembled stalls for Maresy, though the truth was that Maresy was a free horse, unbridled, unsaddled, and unstalled. Maresy was as free as Colene was bound.

She turned to the last entry she had made. It was the day before she had found Darius in the ditch. It was a box done in the shape of an optical illusion, with three projections that weren’t actually there when traced back to their sources; one was really the space between the other two. Variations on the figure were common; many people were intrigued by it. She thought the original was like a tuning fork, but it didn’t matter. The point was, this was her. She looked just exactly like a girl, but when the lines were traced, there was nothing; she was a girl-shaped space between others, and if the others went away, she would cease to appear to exist. She had really been twisted up then. The day before her adventure had begun.

But from the moment she spied Darius, she had neither written to Maresy nor scratched her wrists. Not till she freaked out Biff with a wholesale slash. No boxes either. Her inner life had changed completely.

Now she was back in her own reality, as it were. She started to draw a box, and watched it take form as if of its own volition. It looked like a cross between a prison cell and an execution platform.

“Oh, Maresy, I need you now!” she breathed. “What am I to do? I didn’t trust the man I loved, and now I am alone.”

But that wasn’t quite true. She had trusted Darius; she just hadn’t believed him. She had been willing to sleep practically naked in his arms, but not to stand with him when he tried to go home. Maybe he had seen that, and made it easier for her by pretending she was unsuitable for him.

Pretending? Why should he pretend? He hadn’t pretended about anything else. He had told her where he came from, though he knew she didn’t believe him. He had made her cover her crotch, because blue jeans didn’t do the job to his satisfaction. He had learned enough of her language to talk with her, and had shown how well he understood what she told him. He had been his own man throughout, despite the indignities of being confined to the shed and having to use the pot. He had embraced her nightly without even trying to take any advantage of her. In fact, he had refused sex with her when she offered it. Pretend? He had never pretended! He had said she was unsuitable because that was exactly what she was. She was fourteen years old and suicidal. How could she ever have thought he would want to marry her?

Because he had told her he did. He had always told her the truth, and now she knew that even the least believable part of it had been valid. So he had been willing to marry her, until he learned that she was depressive. He had to have joy, to take and magnify and spread about. That was her most awful liability. She could make others laugh by her cutting humor, but if they could read her inner nature, they would be appalled. Darius would be able to read it in his realm. So he had done what he had to do, and had been kind to her, he thought, letting her go.

“Oh, Darius!” she cried, grief-smitten. “I would have been satisfied to go with you, as your servant or your slave, just to be near you. If only I had believed! Now I have gotten what I deserved. I hope you find a woman you can marry.” But that last was insincere. Colene had wanted to be his wife. Deep down, she didn’t want him to be satisfied with any other woman. Oh, she wanted him to be happy, but not as happy as he might have been with her. And to know it.

She closed her Journal and locked it away. She knew what she had to do. There was a good knife in the kitchen, maybe not as sharp as Slick’s razor, but it would do the job. No more fooling around with compass points.

She went to the house. But her mother was in the kitchen and she couldn’t get the knife. Anyway, she hadn’t figured out the right place to do it. She didn’t want to splash blood all over Bumshed, for it didn’t deserve to be soiled that way. It wouldn’t be safe in her room in the house: her parents hardly ever went there, except those few times when she especially didn’t want them to. They had some kind of parental radar that made them home in at the exact worst times. Outside wasn’t good; someone would be sure to see her. So she would have to figure out a place first; then she could take the knife there and do it quickly.

There was nothing to do except wrap up her homework, so that no one would be suspicious. She would go to school as usual Monday, and keep her eye out for a suitable place. She would certainly find it, and then she would act.

MONDAY she found herself in the bathroom, contemplating her scarred wrist. But she didn’t touch it. She had been playing with suicide before; this time she would do it right. That meant the right place and the right knife. She had seen how easy it was with the sharp razor; she could bleed herself out quickly by slashing both arms similarly. Once she decided on the place that was right. Where she could do it cleanly, and not be discovered until long after she was dead. She had to guarantee that she would not wake up in a hospital, to the shame of failure. Boys had it easy; they used guns, which were easy, quick and sure. But she didn’t know a thing about guns; they frightened her. It has to be by a knife, so the blood could flow gently and prettily.

No place seemed right. Finally, Tuesday night, she did something foolish: she sneaked out to Bumshed in her nightie. She made a mound of books and a pillow, pretending it was Darius, and lay next to him in the darkness. “Take me now,” she breathed to the quiet form, spreading her legs and breathing heavingly. “Do anything you want to do.” Of course he did not, but that did not interfere with the fancy; Darius would not have done it anyway.

By morning she had come to three conclusions. First, she wasn’t fooling herself; she knew there was no man there. So this was pointless. Second, it was too darned cold out here alone, and lonely too. Third, this was the place she had been looking for. Here where she had known him, and brief happiness. She could make it sanitary by having plenty of basins to catch the blood, and she could empty them out as long as she was able. She could make a small hole beside Dogwood and pour it carefully in and cover it up; not only would it be practically untraceable, it would fertilize the tree. She liked the idea of her decorative little tree being nourished by her blood. When she was unable to take out the basin, there might not be enough blood left in her to overflow, so it would be all right. They would find her pale cold body, and a neat brimming basin of blood. That would be nice.

She went to school again Wednesday, concentrating on being absolutely normal. She did not give any of her things away to friends, because that was a recognized tipoff for suicidal intention. She did not mope. She laughed and paid attention in class. As far as she knew, no one had a clue to her plan.

That evening she fetched her favorite belongings and arranged them in a circle in Bumshed. Her ancient teddy bear, Raggedy Ann doll, her book on odd mating customs of the world, one on exotic computer viruses (for “safe” computing), her guitar, the picture of Maresy grazing, and the artificial carnation she had worn to the prom last year. The dance itself had not been great, her date had been gawky, she had been gawky too, being thirteen, but it had become her first significant dance, and now would be her last, so this symbol of it deserved respect. Maybe she would float it in the final basin of blood, her last deliberate act. A white flower on a red background, the opposite of a red rose on a white gown.

Then she fetched the knife.

But as she set up for it, she realized that she had forgotten the most critical thing: the basin. It was too late to fetch it; she would be risking the curiosity of her parents. Dad happened to be home this night, so naturally the two were arguing: “What’s the matter, dear—your paramour have a snit?” “What do you care, you tipsy lady?” That sort of thing. As it progressed, the language would get less polite, and finally they would come to physical contact and have sex on the floor. They fought verbally, not physically, but the sex was in lieu of hitting, and could get pretty violent. Her mother got bonus points for bitchiness if she made him cheat on his mistress. That made him angry, but the woman was sexiest when bitchiest, and he couldn’t resist. Colene hated that scene, but also was morbidly fascinated by it. Maybe if she had taunted Darius as impotent, the way her mother did her father, he would have gotten mad and put it to her hard. That tempted her now, in retrospect, but also repelled her. She did not like anything even hinting of rape. Yet at least she would have had him! Maybe then she would have felt obliged to believe him, and would have gone with him to his fabulous Land of Laughter. So what if she was a stranger there, unable to marry him? It couldn’t be worse than what she faced here.

So she had no basin, and was not about to go back to the house for it. What else would serve? She was definitely not going to spill her precious clean blood on the floor!

Her eye fell on the privy pot. Oh, ugh! Yet what else was there? And it had the remnants of his substance. That was about as close as any part of her could get to any part of him now. So it would have to do. What an image for a romantic song: Blood and Feces. A sure hit with the anti-establishment crowd.

She brought the pot and removed the cover. The stink smote her nose. Quickly she covered it again. Maybe she could put a clothespin on her nose, if she had a clothespin. Anything else? She leaned on the board over the pot, and set the knife down on it while she considered.

She concluded that it didn’t really matter. She would get used to the smell soon enough. So she sat cross-legged, in her nightie without panties, in a position that would have freaked Darius all the way out to the moon, dear man, drew the pot in to her, nestled it inside her crossed ankles, held her breath, lifted the knife, removed the cover board, leaned over, and paused.

Should she do the left arm first, or the right one? She was right-handed, so maybe she should do the right one first, so if her left-handed slash was clumsy she could do it again, and again until she had a proper blood flow into the pot. Then she could transfer the knife and do the left one with one excellent slice. Then she could grasp the far rim of the pot, keeping her arms locked in place, and watch the twin blood flows. It would be glorious!

So why was she hesitating? She was sure there was a reason. There always was.

She explored her motives, and found the relevant one. “Oh, Darius, I don’t want to die away from you!” she said. “I’d so much rather die with you!”

She pondered some more, then decided to sleep on it. She could slice herself as well in the morning as at night. Maybe she would have a chance to sneak into the house and get a better basin, after her parents had sex-sotted themselves out and turned in. It was worth a try.

She lay down, shivering in the cold. She wrapped the blankets around and around her, and curled up into an almost fetal ball. She knew she would not sleep, but at least she wouldn’t freeze.

SHE woke shivering, after an interminable, restless night. The floor was hard, the air was chill, and the blankets seemed to have holes that exactly matched the path of the draft coming in under the door.

But it was her troubled thoughts that caused the greatest disruption of sleep. She was reviewing her life, trying to total up the credits and the debits, to justify her decision to end it. In snatches of dreams she talked to Maresy: “Dear Maresy, today I decided to end it. Well, actually I decided several days ago, but today was the day to do it. Only I didn’t want to use a filthy potty for my blood.”

“You lost your nerve,” Maresy replied.

“No! I just want to do it right!”

“You really don’t want to die. You never did.”

“That so, smarty? Then what do I really want to do?”

“You want to love and be loved.”

Maresy was right. She always was. She knew Colene better than Colene knew herself, because she was more objective. Death was merely the most convenient escape from a life without love. That was why she had not been suicidal in the time she had known Darius. She had had love.

Now she had lost that love. Oh, she still had it, in a sense: she definitely still loved him. But he was gone, and he had explained how he couldn’t come back, because it had been a random setting. So even if he loved her—and she thought he did—it was no good. They were apart forever.

“Why do you think he loves you?” Maresy asked.

“Because he told me he did.”

“But men lie about that.”

“To get sex from women,” she agreed. “But he never had sex with me, even when I offered it. So he wasn’t saying it for sex. Oh, yes, he did want something from me! He wanted my joy. And I would have given him that, if I had had any to give. So he loved me, but couldn’t marry me without destroying me, and he wouldn’t do that. I believe him. I believe him. I believe him.”

“So you do love, and you are loved,” Maresy said. “So why do you want to die?”

That made her ponder for some time. She did have love; why wasn’t it enough? “Because it’s apart,” she said at last. “I want to love and be loved and have it close—like hugging close. Like kissing close. Like sex close. I want to be part of him, and have him be part of me, forever and ever. I want eternal romance.”

“You have foolish juvenile notions. It isn’t that way.”

“How do you know?” Colene shot back.

“I know from what you’ve read. The half-life of romantic love is one and a half years.”

“What do you mean, half-life of love?”

“Remember your physics? Radioactive materials keep losing their radiation, getting less dangerous but never entirely finishing. So you can’t say how long they last. But you can say how long it takes for their level of radioactivity to drop to half of what it was. That’s their half-life, which may be a fraction of a second, or millions of years. So when it comes to the declining excitement of love, the half-life is eighteen months, on average.”

“I don’t believe that! True love is forever!”

“Look at your parents.”

Accurate counterthrust! Where was the romance in her parents’ marriage? As far as she knew, there had never been any. There had just been absence and alcohol and occasional bouts of hostile sex. Yet there must once have been love, or else why had they married?

So apply the half-life law. Suppose they had fallen in love, and in six months gotten married. She had been born the following year. Presto: their love had halved by the time she appeared on the scene, and halved again in the next year and a half. How many times had it halved by now? Take her age, fourteen, and add that first year and a half before her birth: fifteen and a half years since their first love. Enough for ten halvings. Plus maybe a quartering, or whatever. So if their love had started at a hundred per cent, it had gone to fifty per cent, then twenty-five per cent, then—brother! How low had it sunk by this time?

Her thoughts fuzzed out, but her agile brain kept mulling it over, and in due course she concluded that it was just under one per cent. So what she was seeing now was only a hundredth of what they had started with. So now it was just a shared house, some ugly sex, and a messed-up daughter. Their love-child, as it were. More like a tough-love-child.

“You desire that with Darius?” Maresy inquired alertly.

“It wouldn’t be that way with Darius!” she protested. But uncertainty was closing in, like dark fog at dusk. If she could be with Darius, and go to his wonderful Kingdom of Laughter, and everything was just perfect, would the romance be down to one per cent in fifteen years? Would she be an alcoholic and he be having affairs with other women? Would they have a suicidal daughter?

Maresy faded out, for Colene was now absolutely, totally wide awake. Now she knew: it was time to end it. There was no hope for romance, even if it were possible for her to join Darius. So she had lost nothing, really; there had never been anything to make her life worth continuing.

The dirty pot would do. It wasn’t as if her life were clean. She was the offspring of a garbage marriage, and faced more garbage if she tried to grow up and get married herself. The whole thing was pointless.

She sat with the pot, uncovered it, bared her arms, and picked up the knife. Now was the time. Two swift, deep slices, then hang on. “I’ll lay me down and bleed a while,” she murmured. “Then ne’er up again.”

Yet somehow she didn’t make the first cut. She shivered from the cold and the anticipation, and her arms were goose-pimply, but she just sat there not doing it. She couldn’t quite take that final step. She knew she had been playing at suicide before; she couldn’t bleed to death from the scratch of a compass point. She could have done it from the slash of Slick’s razor, but that had been in company; she had known they wouldn’t actually let her die. But now it was real, and she just couldn’t.

“What a hypocrite I am!” she exclaimed. “I know what to do, and I’m too cowardly to do it!”

The knife dropped from her hand. She sat there and sobbed. She had come to the final test of her life, and flunked it.

Yet she could not quite give up the death either. She sat there, congealing with cold, breathing the miasma of the pot. Everything was hopeless! Maybe she would die of the cold, or at least catch pneumonia and expire. Or would that be cheating?

COLENE! Wait for me!

She snapped out of her drift. Time had passed, maybe a little, maybe a lot. She must have nodded off, and dreamed.

Yet something had changed. She felt a certain imperative, or potential, or something.

Take hold!

It was Darius! It was no dream. Maybe she was crazy, but she was ready to go for it. If it was to be a one per cent romance fifteen years down the line, so be it, but it was a hundred per cent now, and now was what counted. She would give him everything immediately, before the joy of it could fade.

She reached out with her mind and took hold. She felt something settle into place. That was all.

But she knew reality had changed. It was a Virtual Mode: a ramp spanning the realities from his to hers. Darius was coming for her! If he was crazy, she would be crazy too.

Gloriously crazy in love!

What now, of the futility of romance? She didn’t care; she was going for it. Because while she was orienting on love, she wasn’t orienting on death.

She got up and looked around. Nothing had changed physically. But this was here, in her reality. It would be different in Darius’ reality.

But how was she to get from here to there? Well, if this was a true Virtual Mode, all she had to do was walk there. She would be at one end, he at the other. It should be easy enough to cross the ramp and join him.

Why wait for him to come for her? She had wanted to depart this life. Now she could do it—without killing herself.

She would meet him halfway.

Still, it might be a fair distance. She should travel prepared. She wasn’t sure how far it might seem in miles. If there were an infinite number of realities, was that an infinite number of miles? No, it had to be fewer than that. But she should use her bicycle, just in case.

She gathered up her scattered things, such as the canned food she had bought for Darius to eat. He had used some, but she had continued to bring in more as she scrounged it. Now she would eat it herself, if she had to. She also dressed and packed a change of clothing, though what she had here in Bumshed wasn’t exactly clean.

Her bike was leaning against the wall of the shed, under the overhang. It wasn’t in top condition, but it was functional. She hadn’t ridden it much in the past year, because a bike was really kid stuff, and a teenager was not a kid. But a bicycle was the most efficient mode of transport known to man; a person on a bike used less energy than any walking animal or any traveling machine. So she would be a kid again to travel—so that she could be a woman when she got there.

Hastily assembled, she walked the bike out to the road. It wasn’t nearly as late as it had seemed in the shed; actually her watch said eight o’clock. Things were hardly stirring outside. She could get cleanly away before her parents caught on.

That made her pause. How would they react to her disappearance? For she knew she wasn’t coming back.

She walked back to the shed. There she dug out a pad of paper and a pencil. DEAR FOLKS: DON’T WORRY; I AM FINE. I JUST HAVE SOMEWHERE TO GO. COLENE.

She tore off the sheet and set it on top of the board covering the pot. Eventually someone would look in here, and then the note would be seen. That should be enough. They might put out an alert for her, but she was going where their alert could not reach. As she understood it, the ramp intersected her reality only at this spot; everything else was in other realities, no matter how similar to hers it seemed.

She walked her bike back out to the street, got on it, and started pedaling. Immediately, her sense of “whereto” went wrong. This wasn’t the way.

She looped the bike and went the other way. Now it was better. It felt like going uphill, only it wasn’t physical and it wasn’t hard. It was like orienting on a distant light.

Actually the light was a little to the side; the street wasn’t going in quite the right direction. But neither were the intersecting streets. She had to turn and go down one, then turn again.

Then she reached a region where there weren’t cross streets, and had to keep going straight. Gradually her awareness of the proper direction faded. This was no good; it seemed that she had to stay pretty close to the center of the ramp, or she lost it.

Finally there was an intersection, and she turned and rode at right angles. Before long she felt it: the attuning. Good; that meant that she didn’t have to stay on it all the time; she could detour and pick it up later. She might have to do S-shaped figures, crossing and recrossing the ramp, but it did give her more freedom.

But was she getting anywhere? Everything looked ordinary, not magical. She had now biked more than a mile. That wasn’t far, but how far would it be before something changed?

She just didn’t know.

Well, she would give it a real try regardless. After all, she was skipping school, and that would get her in trouble if they caught her. She had to get far enough to be sure they couldn’t.

She came to a red light, and stopped. She knew that the rules of the road applied to cyclists the same as cars, and she obeyed them scrupulously. To do otherwise was dangerous. It was ironic that people who wanted to live were suicidally careless about such rules, while she who was suicidal was careful. But she knew how close death was. She didn’t want her blood splattered across the busy highway; she wanted it handled neatly.

She saw a car going through the intersection. It was a limousine. At the wheel was a seedy-looking man; in back was a well-manicured dog, sitting up high as if the car belonged to it. That made her smile.

Then the light changed to blue, and she pedaled across. She was entering a parklike section, with trees growing fairly near the pavement. She liked that. She didn’t remember any park here; in fact, she didn’t remember this neighborhood at all, now that she actually looked at something other than the road in front of her, but that was all right, since she wouldn’t be back.

Blue?

She skewed to a stop. Then she turned and stared back, expecting to correct the glitch in her memory.

No, the green light was blue.

She resumed travel. She had never seen a blue Go light before, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. Maybe it was a faulty lens, or maybe somebody had sprayed blue paint on it.

But all the lights thereafter were blue too. Soon the red lenses turned to orange. The color scheme was definitely different!

Move over, human!

Startled, Colene veered off the road. A car zoomed by, with another dog sitting up in the rear. It was as if the dog had yelled at her!

But the yell had been in her mind.

Colene stopped under a tree near another intersection and pondered. Blue traffic lights. Dogs being chauffeured. Telepathy. Was she imagining things, or was reality changing?

A car slowed and stopped near her. The black and white head of a Dalmatian dog poked out of the rear window. Are you lost, human girl?

“No, thank you,” she said before she could think. “Just resting.”

Best get on to your obedience school, the thought came. Then the dog’s head withdrew, the window closed, and the car nudged back onto the road and accelerated.

There was no doubt now! Telepathic dogs! “I don’t think we’re in Oklahoma any more, Tonto,” she murmured, taking brief pleasure in mixing her references.

Heartened but also nervous, she resumed travel. If this was a region where dogs governed people, it wasn’t what she was looking for. Evidently Darius lived somewhere beyond this. She had somehow thought the ramp would proceed straight from her place to his, but of course that wasn’t necessarily so. There could be any number of different realities between, and one with telepathic dogs was among them.

The dog had stopped to check on her, as a person might when seeing a lost puppy. The dogs were evidently in charge here, using human beings as drivers. And people were sent to obedience schools? She had better move on through!

But it was good to have this assurance that the Virtual Mode was in place. She had wanted to die, then had loved Darius, then had lost him and wanted to die again, and now was on her way to find him again. Girl meets man, girl loses man, girl regains man: standard story, happy ending. And if she ran afoul of that one per cent factor, fifteen years down the line, well, at least she’d have the pleasure of wearing out the romance the hard way: by loving him to pieces.

The surface of the road changed. Now it was rougher, and the cars had wheels that were more like caterpillar treads. And the animals riding in them were no longer dogs, but cats—big ones.

She paused at another intersection, waiting for the traffic to clear. Almost all of the vehicles were traveling at right angles to her route, which was maybe just as well. She had heard a couple coming up behind her, but they seemed to have turned off before reaching her.

A car came toward her, slowing. A tiger bounded out. You will make a fine meal, tender girl!

Terrified, Colene pedaled desperately, bumping her bike over the road-ground. The tiger leaped—and disappeared before reaching her.

What had happened? Had someone vaporized it? No, there had seemed to be no violence, other than that being practiced by the tiger. It had just phased out.

She had ridden into another reality, where the tiger wasn’t after her! It looked much the same, but was different. Her ramp evidently made the terrain of the realities merge smoothly, so she could travel along it, but the inhabitants were not continuous in the same way. That was probably just as well; otherwise there might have been an endless chain of Colenes setting out on their bicycles, all heading for the same set of Dariuses. One of each was enough!

Now she knew two more things: there was direct danger to herself in these realities, and she could get out of it by moving quickly forward. But the farther she moved, the stranger things were becoming. She could get into trouble before she knew it, and be stuck. If that tiger had caught her—

She delved into her pack and brought out the kitchen knife. Now it was not to cut her arms, but to protect her! But she doubted she would be very effective against a telepathic tiger.

Surely worse lay ahead.

She realized now why so few cars had been traveling her way. She was going in the “steep” climb through realities, and the cars were remaining in their own realities, so never reached her. But the streets going at right angles were all in whatever reality she was passing at the moment, like long rungs on a ladder.

Should she turn back? She would be safer in more familiar territory. But that would not get her to Darius. So she would have to go on, and hope she found him before she got into an inextricable predicament, as Principal Brown would put it. Or an inedible picklement, as the kids would translate it.

She rode forward. But this just wasn’t cycling terrain. It was more work to ride than to walk. So with regret she walked her bike, hoping to find a better road in another reality.

Suddenly a huge bear was in front of her. It wore a woodsman’s hat and held an axe. A wild human! it thought. Exterminate it!

Colene wanted to run forward into the next reality, but the bear blocked the way. She would have to retreat, and hope it would go away soon. She stepped back, and the bear vanished.

But suppose it didn’t go away? Suppose it brought in its henchbears and waited for her return? She could be caught before she could move! Suddenly her life, so worthless a few hours ago, was excruciatingly precious.

She couldn’t wait here long anyway; something similar to a bear or a cat would come along the road, and nab her. Maybe she could hide in the forest to the side, but there were two problems with that. One was that she didn’t know what monsters were in there, or what bugs. The other was that she didn’t want to drift any farther than she had to from the direct ramp, because she might not be able to find it again. Then she would really be in trouble, lost in shifting realities!

Even if she managed to handle those problems, what about night? When that came, and she got tired, and had to sleep, she would be vulnerable. She had to get somewhere safe before night—and how could she find such a place, in these strange worlds? How could she trust even the safest-looking place?

I’m in trouble! she thought, fearing that she was vastly understating the case. She really should have waited for Darius to come for her!

But was he any better equipped to handle these realities? His realm was magic, not telepathy, not animal dominance.

He had almost died in her reality, because he couldn’t cope without magic. She feared he wouldn’t do any better than she, and might do worse—which would mean that he would not survive the journey. So maybe she had better meet him half-way, or three quarters of the way, to be sure they both were alive to love when they met.

Are you from afar?

There was another thought, faint but clear. Was it a tiger or a bear? It felt friendly, but that could be deceptive. Should she answer?

Why not? She was in trouble anyway. Maybe this represented some kind of help.

Yes! she thought as hard as she could.

Are you in distress?

Yes.

Are you human?

Yes. I am Colene, a human girl.

Come to me. I need a companion.

So did she! But if this was a tiger trying to lure her in, she would be a fool to go.

Also a fool to pass up a potential friend. Who are you?

I am Seqiro. Please come quickly; this mental contact across realities represents a strain.

Across realities? That didn’t sound like a tiger! She would risk it. How can I find you?

I am on your path. I have felt your approach. Come to my reality, and follow my mind to my stall.

But there was the bear lurking for her. She considered briefly, then walked several feet to the side, faced forward again, and started running.

Her strategy worked. She saw a bear to the side, but by the time it turned to spot her, she was behind its plane and the way was clear.

She forged on, trusting to blind luck to keep her out of serious trouble. The road deteriorated further, becoming a beaten path. But maybe this was ridable. She got on her bike, set her gears to the lowest ratio, and pedaled hard. Yes, she was moving well.

Here! You are passing my reality!

Oops! She turned and rode back, until the thought agreed that she was on the right plane. Then she turned to the side and followed it, walking the bike over the forest floor.

Follow my thought, Seqiro sent. His signal was much stronger now. There is some danger for you, but my thought will avoid it.

She hoped so. She followed his thought out of the forest and to a rustic village. There were many oddly dressed people, and horses, dogs, and cats, each going about his business. She did her best to look as if she were one of them, going about her business, but wasn’t sure she wasn’t ludicrously obvious as a foreigner. At least this didn’t look like a bear or tiger camp.

In the course of this travel, she wandered across the reality lines several times, but his mental contact remained. Sometimes she stepped across the boundary deliberately, to avoid being spotted, then back in farther along. She was getting better at using the Virtual Mode.

Seqiro led her through a back alley that passed several stalls where horses were stabled. He had used the term “stall”; evidently he had meant it literally. But what kind of man would live in a stall? A stable hand?

The presence of horses reminded her of her imaginary friend Maresy. Colene had always liked horses, not in the sense of riding them but in the sense of just liking them. She knew they were not considered very intelligent as animals went; cows did twice as well on maze tests. But there was a basic niceness about horses that other animals lacked. Oh, there were those who swore by cats because they were cuddly and purring and quiet, but cats were actually pretty selfish creatures who made friends only with those who fed them well. Some folk swore by dogs, supposedly man’s best friend, but there were thousands of dog bites every year, suggesting how thin that veneer of friendship was. There were pet birds, locked in cages or in houses; hardly any of them would remain if given a chance to fly into the wild. But horses—there was just something about horses. Oh, some could be mean and some could be lazy, of course. But, taken as a whole, they were better than people. That was why she wrote to Maresy Doats in her Journal. Maresy was a whole lot more serious than her name suggested.

But of course a family living in a suburb, scraping along in the middle-class two-incomes-one-child mode, could not even think of having a horse. This had never been an issue; Colene had seen from the outset that it was impossible. Even had it been possible, she would have hesitated to bring a horse into such a situation, because at any moment her mother could lose her job—when her alcoholism began manifesting at work—or her father could lose his, when he had a fight with a mistress and she made a scene that embarrassed his company. Even without one of those events, there was no love in the family, not even that one per cent romance. The family was a bomb waiting to be detonated. A horse wouldn’t like associating with that. So Maresy would always be a mere dream.

Still, it was nice passing through this region, for a reason irrelevant to what she was actually doing. By the look of it, this was an ordinary primitive hamlet where horses were the main animals, instead of a reality in which telepathy was practiced. She wouldn’t mind living here, near the stalls, and maybe sneaking treats to the horses when their masters weren’t looking. That was the nature of girls and horses.

But she certainly hoped that her telepathic friend really was a friend, because she was getting physically tired and needed a safe place to rest. If it turned out to be another bear or tiger—

Finally she stopped at a particular stall. There was a large brown stallion in it, gazing out.

Where next, Seqiro? she thought.

Duck down and enter my stall, the thought came back. We must explore motives.

Enter the stall? Colene stared at the horse with dawning wonder. Could it be?

There had been telepathic dogs, cats, and bears. Why not a horse? You?

Slowly the horse nodded.

Something very like instant love blossomed in her heart. A tiger or bear she would not have trusted, but a horse! Of course!

She ducked down under the heavy gate that closed the stall, and came up inside. She stood next to Seqiro. He was about eighteen hands tall at the shoulder, about six feet. Almost a foot higher than the top of her head. He smelled wonderfully horsy.

It was all so suddenly ecstatic. A mind-reading horse! What more could any girl ask?

May I pat you? she thought.

Yes.

She reached up and patted his massive neck on the left side. His mane fell to the right side, so didn’t get in the way. His hide was sleek and warm. What a beautiful creature!

May I hug you?

Yes.

She reached up with both arms and clasped his neck as well as she could. She put her face against his hide and just sort of breathed his ambience. He was just such a totally magnificent animal!

May I adore you?

Yes.

She felt her emotion surging into overload.

May I cry on you?

Yes.

She stood there and wept, her tears squeezing down between her face and his hide. It was a great relief.

Finally, she lifted her face. I like horses, she thought belatedly.

I like girls.

That seemed to cover the situation.